PK Tip: Locating Related Keywords with Related Mode

When you select a keyword in Personal Knowbase's Index Window, you may get a long list of articles associated with that keyword. To shrink your Titles list, it's useful to know which keywords to select to make the list more manageable.

You can reduce the Index column from listing all keywords in your data file to only listing the keywords that are related to your current articles list. This shows you the keywords related to the keyword(s) that you've already selected by being shared by at least one article. This makes it easy to see which keywords will help further pare down your Titles list.

PK Tip: Dragging Keywords to Locate Related Articles

In Personal Knowbase, the usual way to locate an article related to a topic of interest is to "select" a keyword for that topic. For example, to see all your articles related to fish, you move the keyword fish from the Index column to the Selected column in the Index Window.

But if you already located an article on your topic, you can quickly locate related articles by dragging keywords from the article instead of from the full keyword Index. This is especially useful as your keyword Index list grows larger and more difficult to browse.

PK Tip: Creating Special Keywords

In Personal Knowbase, your keyword Index list is generally sorted alphabetically. But you might have special keywords that you use frequently and want to be able to access instantly.

PK Tip: Finding Articles Which Have No Keywords

Sometimes, in the rush of creating and saving articles, you may forget to assign keywords to every article. Or, you may delete a keyword, leaving an article with no keywords, if that was the article's only keyword.

However it happens, over time, you may discover that you have articles in your Personal Knowbase data file which do not have keywords assigned to them.

You can easily locate any articles with no keywords:

PK Tip: Checking for Unassigned Keywords

Over time, you will inevitably discover that you have keywords in your Personal Knowbase data file that are not assigned to any articles. Perhaps you've deleted the articles that they were originally assigned to. Or you created keywords you intended to use, but your needs changed.

Of course, there are valid reasons to keep some unassigned keywords. There may be keywords you aren't currently using, but may need again in the future. Or you may want to keep complete sets of keywords for fixed groups like months or days of the week. Or you may want a keyword for each member of your club, even if no articles yet pertain to some members.

PK Tip: Assigning a Keyword to Multiple Articles

Do you need to add a keyword to a group of articles? You don't need to open each article and add the keyword separately to each one. You can assign a keyword to multiple articles at once in Personal Knowbase's Index Window by dragging it.

PK Tip: Merging Keywords

Occasionally, you may discover that you have two (or more) keywords in your Personal Knowbase data file that are redundant. Plurals, alternate spellings, and abbreviations are common culprits.

PK Tip: Using the Compact Command for Maintenance and Repair

In these days of large, cheap hard drives, most of us don't feel any need to compact a database file to save disk space.

But Personal Knowbase's Compact command does more than reduce your data file to its minimum size. Here are three additional tasks Compact can help you with:

Using Personal Knowbase to Organize Recipes

Whether you're an ardent chef, you're gathering together all your extended family's recipes, you're studying mixology, or you just bake occasionally for holidays, Personal Knowbase provides a natural and flexible way to organize your recipes. Collect all your recipes in one place where you can access them on your computer, print them, or export them to text files.

Here are some ideas for setting up a PK data file for your recipes.

PK Tip: Typing in the Index Column

In Personal Knowbase, normally we locate keywords in the Index column by clicking them with the mouse. But we can also locate keywords using the keyboard. Typing to locate keywords can save you from constant scrolling in long lists of keywords.

When the highlighted cursor focus (when the highlight has a dotted outline) is in the Index column, you can type the first few letters of a keyword to move the highlight to that keyword in the list. So, for example, if you type "sm", the highlight will move to the first keyword starting with "sm".